Losing Battles
by Copper Clouds
Summary: A brief bit of insight into Snake-28 written after a couple readers expressed interest in knowing more about her. Pre-KW. On the nature of mourning and remembrance and is as such not a particularly happy read. Minor KW spoilers


AN: I do not own _Naruto_. Just Snake, or rather we unwillingly coexist.

I would say that this is my apology for not updating KW for so long, but as this is only likely to appeal to a small portion of those readers, it doesn't really qualify. Those of you who aren't interested in Snake-28, this isn't going to be your cup of tea. Those of you looking for info on when I am going to get those new chapters out, check out my profile every once in a while. I will eventually post news in there, but don't hold your breath. Lots of problems need fixing yet.

As always, my characters are supposed to be human and therefore biased, petty, perfectly capable of lying to themselves, and often ignorant. If you believe everything they have to say, you have only yourself to blame.

Anyway, this should help you make a little sense of that scene where Sakura and Kakashi see Snake's room. Minor spoilers for coming KW chapters.

I wrote a stageplay version of this scene for a class some months ago, which is far better in my opinion, but with the limited formatting available on this site, this version is more readable.

* * *

Snake crouched in the boughs of an oak at the edge of the clearing around the KIA monument. It was a pity that November had stolen the leaves that would have protected her from the cold rain, but Snake was used to ignoring such physical punishment. The burn of massacred flesh and sensitive, scarred nail beds and the ache of lumpy bones had seen to that. She always took pains to avoid mirrors because that was a pain she didn't know how to deal with even after more than thirty years. She had always been weak-minded.

Self-pity wasn't why she was here though.

She assumed her teammates were dead. She didn't actually know and didn't have the heart to look them up. That would require her to recall who she was and she wasn't that person anymore, at least according to Ojisan. She shoved aside the ache that shouldn't exist in the empty place in her chest and sucked air through broken teeth. Teammates. Back on track. She sighed. Daichi-sensei, why was this so hard?

She jerked upright, startled by that unbidden thought. She grasped it desperately. _Daichi-sensei?_She searched her pockets for a pencil and a scrap of something to write on, but she came up empty-handed. Now she worked to keep her stinging eyes from betraying her. She would forget this revelation and she would go back to being a vagabond with no belonging. She wanted to remember this feeling, this name associated with fatherly affection. Why did she always have to forget? Dasi? Daki? She sucked in a ragged breath.

Fuck.

She tried to console herself with the knowledge that deep down, she did remember the person who had trained her. Somewhere in her haven, she did have something of his with minute traces of his being on it. The memories weren't all gone. But it wasn't enough to keep the ache away. Her vision blurred for a moment before she used the pain generated by forcing her cracked lips into a grimace to stem the stupid sorrow. Who was to say that he wouldn't see the demon Ojisan kept saying had replaced her?

Apathy, she needed the stillness. Apathy was god for her against the horror that graced people's faces when she wore that old summer dress she had loved once, the one with elegant black flowers done in a hand influenced by the art nouveau movement all over it. She had worn it to a wedding that had ended in tears, blood, suicide, and the pup. The bride, no longer blushing and hale, had asked her to watch out for the pup when it finally came. The bride had died. There had been too much blood. _Something had torn! Someone get—! Get what?_ Apathy had demanded that she burn that dress, so she had committed it to the flames.

Apathy, she needed a mission. She hated this sick fuck who pissed and moaned in her head when she wasn't busy working on how to kill her targets.

The KIA stone caught her eye. Right, teammates. That was why this pup was here.

He acted as though the fierce wind wasn't trying to soak icy rain into his bones. He would get sick. Arrogant little fucker, see if she would nurse him through his stupidity. She had better things to do than look out for this twist. She wondered what the Yondaime had seen in him to demand that promise from her in a way that forced her to remember it.

_See, Ojichan? See? I'm not just a monster. I'll take care of you. I promise. Even if you don't want me to… I don't blame you, just please don't turn me away! I'll look after the arrogant pup and even when I'm gone, you'll be okay, I promise. It'll be better when I'm gone, right? You won't have to remember anymore._

"_Sign right here, please, Beni—"_

She shut off the remembrance of the fucking Flash's slight, encouraging smile. She hadn't wanted to seem human to that screw-up. She was Snake. Not B--! Ojichan… Ojisan, ojisan now. He didn't want her being so familiar with him. He sometimes came back to himself when she used formality, so she knew this for sure. He never came back when she tried to call him by the name she had used _before_. Ojisan had assured her during one of his lucid periods that she was not Beniha and never would be again.

"Please," she whispered involuntarily, "I just want to go home. I'll tell you anything. Just please—!" Trembling from horrors she didn't remember, one hand squeezed a particularly twisted, lumpy section of her shinbone.

_Ojichan hadn't told them._

She had always been weak-minded.

Apathy, she was a mess. She pinched the skin over the bone viciously through her pants to get a hold on herself. She shouldn't have come here.

Sarutobi always made her stay for a week in November. He thought that she needed to be in the village where he could keep an eye on her. He thought that remembering here, where she could supposedly mourn freely, would help her. Fuu-sensei had probably told him that shit after she had gone mad in one of Rain's little villages. One of the villagers had walked like the one that had held the crowbar though!

Shaking now, she curled up in a little ball and wondered if rocking back and forth like the broken man she had once watched claw his eyes out had would help. All it would do would be to make her fall out of her tree though and then she wouldn't be able to share her pain. Once this week was over, she would be fine. She would be Snake. Beniha would go back to being dead.

"He died for nothing, you know," she jeered. _Beniha died for nothing. Ojichan didn't tell them anything, but they hit all the children Ojichan loved more than me anyway. Beniha hurt for nothing._ The pup's back stiffened and she could feel his rage. He hated that she was interrupting his daily mourning, but the little fucker really needed to get over himself. Talking to a stone, what good did that do? "That girl he loved still died, just later. Maybe they're fucking like rabbits in the afterlife."

She was impressed that the knife up his sleeve stayed there.

"It would be kind of funny considering how you're too scared to touch a real woman. You really think that reading those books and jerking off is going to make that Obito happy? Really, it's all just sweat, some rutting, and a spoonful of semen that the woman makes sure dies." _Not that Beniha knows firsthand. Beniha died when she was sixteen. She hadn't gotten even one rut before scars made it impossible for Snake._

That's why she laughed when he turned and attempted to burn holes in her with his mismatched eyes. "If it's so easy, please don't keep away from whoring on my account."

"If? If it's so easy? Why, little genius, don't you _know_? You always insist that you know everything that's best. That bit of asswipe material there in your pouch insists that sex is best. Jiraiya has paid for the best since he couldn't get Tsunade to take a tumble with him. Really, the fucking Flash was the only one of you who got it right, but he went off and got himself killed while destroying his son's life. Still, his woman was already dead, so I guess she wasn't in a position to mind how he fucked up her legacy."

He turned his back on her again and retreated into the cold comfort of his dead teammates' memories.

She envied him.

"Do you ever get tired of being a bitch?" he asked sarcastically.

_Always_. "Never. It's so easy around you. Really, watching those girls pant over a little virgin just sends me into giggles. Whenever you manage to twist Sarutobi around to your little plans, it tickles my funny bone to remember that he's fathered two brats while you have yet to work up the balls to shove your cock inside a woman. Do you even have balls? Your mother didn't live long enough to tell me whether you'd been born a half man. One of her uncles had that problem if I recall correctly…"

"You never do."

That hurt.

"For all you know, you could be remembering one of your uncles."

_How dare this twist insult Ojisan! _"I have no uncles, wolfling. Some snakes are cannibalistic." Her own words brought a twisted smile to her lips. It was true in a way. She could eat Ojisan alive now. It would be easy.

"Why don't you go bug someone else?"

"That would be disobeying orders left by your dear sensei. He loved you so much that he shackled us until you die. Or until I die, I suppose. However, I think it's more likely that you'll die first. You're the one that has fatalistic tendencies inspired by what you view as personal failure you deem worthy of implanting in everyone else."

She knew she wasn't making any sense. He confirmed it by ignoring her. Of course, he also ignored her whenever she made too much sense for him to bear. However, he wasn't trembling from suppressed rage, so she figured it was the first option.

Suddenly, she felt lighter. She expressed this blessed relief from the press of stupid angst by laughing aloud and launching herself out of her tree. She landed soundlessly behind Kakashi and brushed by him to lay a hand on the stone, tracing the weathered engravings. "I don't know your names, but I miss you," she murmured. "Sensei misses you too, wherever he is. I don't know."

She turned around in time to catch the pup's unguarded surprise. She pulled off her mask, ignoring the blinding rain, and put her gloved hands on his gaunt shoulders, gently pulling him down to her level since he was a good foot taller than she was. He resisted her, but she, obscenely, had more muscle. She was built despite everything. He was a wiry thing, but he was no match for her in an arm wrestling match.

Feeling whimsical, she planted her chapped lips on his forehead, or rather on his slanted forehead protector. The metal was numbingly cold. He stumbled away from her, looking appalled. She laughed again, gently. "Don't worry, wolfling," she assured him, forgetting to put the old rasp in her voice. "They're proud of you. Your mother especially. She only wanted you to be happy."

She knew where this mercurial mood came from. Years ago, now, she was carefully working the lock with the bobby pins she had managed to knock out of one of her tormentors' hair with carefully calculated struggles. The pins all foiled and _freedom!_She still didn't know how she had made it out of there, so broken, with Ojichan. The joy still echoed every year though.

She smiled up at the sky, just as she had then. "See, Ojichan? See? I got us out. It's not a lie. Please, let's go home…" Ojichan hadn't moved though. "Come on. Please, before they realize we're gone! We have to go! The Hokage—!"

Snake grabbed her flat chest at the exact spot where her broken ribs had protested when she had begun to shout. She thought someone was shaking her, but she had to get Ojichan back to Konoha so he wouldn't tell. No one could tell. Konoha's secrets were safe in Ojichan as long as he was with her. Nothing could persuade Ojichan to give them up. Nothing.

When Sarutobi arrived, Snake was beginning to come back to herself. Kakashi hovered at the old man's side while the old bastard's ANBU guard stood stoically in the rain. "Snake?"

"I hate you."

"I know you do, my dear."

"Why did you tell him? Why couldn't Ojichan have told?"

"Because he was a good jounin, child." _Child. She was nearly fifty._"He was a good jounin who knew what the Will of Fire meant, as you did. Because of him, Konoha has flourished. Because of you, Konoha lived to fight another day, Kakashi lived another day, all those children lived another day."

Snake got to her feet unsteadily and pulled her mask back on. "Fuck your will of fire and may Konoha and all its lies burn to the ground."

_Ojichan, come on! Let's go home!_

She threw herself homewards with irrational abandon. The trap door secreted beneath the carefully arranged debris allowed her access to the basement walls. She shimmied through the tight space until she found the trap door in the ceiling of her closet. She dropped into her inaccessible Haven and curled up in the midst of the memories she couldn't remember anymore. She almost wished the dead house would bury her alive.

_See? It's a lie. None of us got out._

_Ever._


End file.
